it's really difficult to get good salary information. glassdoor.com is nice but getting data from them will be pain (you probably cant crawl them). I was thinking about writing some spider parsing Stack Overflow careers or "who is hiring" HN threads. But if you get data in this way you only get salaries offered and not salaries actually paid. I guess salaries paid might differ from what is offered. There was a spreadsheet so maybe OP could check this https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1a1Df6dg2Pby1UoNlZU2l...https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11331223 I wonder if this will confirm ideas about bimodality.
Does anybody else think the salaries are a little high? Perhaps the sample size is skewed? I'm somewhat senior in software engineering, but I literally don't know a single person making over 200k. Nada. Not one. I also don't know any college grads who started making 150k. That seems absurd, unless you're only looking at certain companies and top performers or something.
I do know two people making over 200 k$/yr in base salary as pure programmers. They're very good at their jobs (Interestingly, as far as I can tell, neither of them are "brilliant" technically, merely "good". They just combine that with incredible work efficacy and solid communication skills.)
That said, I know bunches who will make over 200 k$ in total liquid comp this year. And before you pooh-pooh the equity part, if you've been at a public company for more than a year, equity's pretty much the same as cash (albeit a slightly unpredictable quantity thereof.)
Where do you live? The numbers you are mentioning sound sound very realistic in the Bay Area, if you are talking about total compensation (salary + bonus + equity).
I'm going to be pretty upset if these salaries aren't at least a little high, because I'm nowhere near that even after 25 years experience and a master's degree.
Please make sure you understand log replication and go through fire drills for the list of things that can go wrong with bi-directional replication. The last thing you'll want to do is deploy this into production and wing operations as you go.